Mike Tierney
Hello and welcome to better ways. Tips and tricks for getting the most out of ServiceNow native identity. I'm here with Thad Smith, the VP of Solution architecture for Clear Skye.
Thad, you recently encountered a sort of change in a customer's requirement. Give us a little bit of background on that.
Thad Smith
Yeah, thanks Mike. This customer is a financial organization based out of New York City and they've been with us for a couple of years now. And like most financial organizations and really like most organizations, they may have a lot of non-employees that they need to be able to manage access for. And like most organizations, they don't have an HR system or an SAP Fieldglass or anything like that, that we can actually connect to so we understand when these contractors, consultants, vendors and the like need access, what they're actually doing work for the organization and when they're no longer working for the organization. Of course, like most IGA solutions we ship out-of-the-box forms for being able to manually onboard these types of users. So we deployed a form from our application and added some more bills and whistles. We gave it the ability to detect if there is an employee to contractor conversion scenario or maybe bringing back an existing consultant that is no longer active in the system so that we don't create duplicate accounts.
Mike Tierney
You said, like most applications we ship with forms, and that's true. But what we're looking at here is a Clear Skye form housed within a ServiceNow catalog.
Thad Smith
That's exactly right. This is the same place that employees go to submit service requests or hardware requests I mean it's a true service catalogue.
Thad Smith
So in this case, they can either lock down the form so that only a handful of individuals have access to it, or they can have a strong approval process, and they elected to have a strong approval process. They exposed the form to any active employee of the organization, and if an employee submits a request for a non-employee to be on boarded, it'll go to the manager for approval and then once the manager approves, it'll go to their manager. So they actually have two sets of eyes on the glass before this non-employee gets any access to any corporate application. So that's actually been in their environment for a couple of years now and they recently came and they said well, what we what we need is if the manager's manager submits the request, we wanted it to be automatically approved. This really shows the power of building an identity solution on top of the ServiceNow platform, but really for our product team to be able to roll out features.
In this case, in a feature called approver criteria that's actually been in the application for a little over two years now. This is a small bit of code that basically evaluates the relationship of who's being asked to approve it and looks to see if it is their manager that submitted the request. If it is, the system automatically approves. We deployed this to their environment; it took about 5 minutes and immediately satisfied their requirement. So if I go back into this form, we're onboarding Tiffany Parker and we're assigning Amelia Walker as the manager. And I happen to be Amelia's manager according to the data here. So if I submit this request, the system is automatically going to evaluate the approval process as well as those approver criteria records to be able to automatically approve without having to go through any approval processes and that's exactly what you see here: the approval process identified Amelia Walker as the first approver and myself as the second approver, but then evaluated this rule and determined that because of the fact that I'm Amelia's manager, the system automatically approved it.
Mike Tierney
And it’s all there for an auditor, if they need to see it.
Thad Smith
That's exactly right.
Mike Tierney
That is pretty cool. That’s today's Better Ways We IGA – a little bit about how having identity native on ServiceNow gives you increased flexibility to tailor your solution to your needs.
